Jane Green Quotes

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

I read so much about men who aren’t what they seem, and particularly stories written by women who found out their husbands had a slew of secrets they knew nothing about.

Having struggled with food issues and eating disorders myself, particularly when I was younger, I’ve long been interested in using it within my books.

I think friendship is more important than love, but that love that grows out of friendship is the very best of all.

What I want in a good beach read is sunshine, drama, easy-reading and transportation to another world and other people‘s problems.

I am not a big skier, but I love apres-ski wear and imagine I would look great in an all-white, fur-trimmed ski suit.

As a child, growing up in Hampstead, North London, I was shockingly fair-skinned. Holidays involved me spending the second and third day face-down on a bed, shrieking should anyone touch my blistered skin.

For me, ‘Bookends’ marks the start of my foray into commercial fiction, away from what has always been thought of as more traditional chick lit – single girl in the city trips around in Manolos looking for Mr. Right.

The life of a bestselling novelist sounds like it ought to be spectacularly glamorous and fun, but in fact I spend most of my time incognito, and in fact were you to pass me in the street you would think I was just another dowdy suburban mom.

When I was a student, I had a part time job as a barmaid at a dodgy pub in Kent.

My teens and 20s were spent lying on sheets of tinfoil in the weak English sun, covered in baby oil. In Greece and France I would burn, then turn a dark brown.

I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who ‘gets‘ cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.

When you’re working from home and you’ve got children, a big night out is going to Pizza Express down the road.

For me, decorating perfection means eclectic styles and collections of beautiful things like pottery, pillboxes and match strikers.

The bad news is that my thin melanoma has something called mitosis, which means the cancer cells are dividing and multiplying even as I write. My thin melanoma has already spread outside of the tumor and into the deep layers of skin.

I started to think about the assumptions we make that everyone we meet operates under the same moral code, and how betrayed we feel when that isn’t the case.

Sadly, I don’t think books ever sell based on your name alone – the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

I have a gorgeous office at home but tend not to write there because there are so many distractions.

I show the people I love that I love them by gathering them in my kitchen and feeding them, so no surprise that most of my characters do the same thing.

I have a business manager and a book-keeper who deals with our household bills. My husband and I sit down with her for a weekly report on how much money is going out, but I’m not terribly interested, and I don’t have the patience for it.

I wanted to write stories I wanted to read, that I and my friends related to.

I now realise how liberating all-inclusive resorts are. No carrying huge handbags anywhere. No having to worry about purses being pinched. No totting up the price in your head and fretting that you’ve spent too much.

I no longer think you can live without passion.

As far back as I can remember, I have worshipped the sun. My skin is fair, but as the years have gone by, it has toughened and darkened. I now turn a rich golden brown every summer, but only after the first day of burning.

As someone who is displaced – I left London almost fifteen years ago to make Connecticut my home – I am drawn to stories about people who don’t belong, whether physically or emotionally, and who find their families of choice in their friends.

I always thought I’d be the quintessential Earth Mother, but when I had Harrison, I really wasn’t the natural mother that I always thought I would be. I adore children, but I was never that interested in newborn babies.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

I treated the first few books as a very long journalistic exercise. I thought of every chapter as an article that needed to be finished.

Chick lit was amazing, and I was thrilled to be part of it.

I believe it is the flaws that make us interesting, our backgrounds, the hardships.

I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I’ve been married.

My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.

I have a theory that you can tell what the head of a company is like by the people who work there. I knew a publishing house that was run on fear and paranoia, and I felt sorry for everyone who worked there. Needless to say, the person at the helm was not known for kindness, warmth, or grace.

I have only ever been to Antigua to hop over to other Caribbean islands. The airport had always seemed perfectly lovely, but I’m a quiet sort of holiday girl, and Antigua always seemed big.

I have a deep and passionate love of America. It is where I have always thought I would be happiest, and although I miss England desperately, I find that my heart definitely has its home over here.

Taking a risk is always frightening, but I gave myself a set period of time and had enough money to see me through. I operated from the belief that things would be okay, that if I wasn’t successful I would find myself a job, but either way, I would be fine.

A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, ‘Hang on… if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.’ That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.

I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.

When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.

I have learned that it is imperative that I make time for my friends, that they demand to be as much a part of the mix as my family and my work, and perhaps more so, because they are not an inevitability.

Ten years ago, you wrote a book and you never expected to find out anything about the author. Now with social media, everyone wants that connection. I think our readers want to be invited into our lives and brought on the journey and be part of this whole process.

Melanoma is not the most common of skin cancers, but it is the most dangerous if not found in the early stages.

I know plenty of people with kids in elite, private schools and had heard many stories. I have drifted into the homes of some of those very wealthy families in New York and am fascinated with the dynamic and how much freedom the children are given.

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

By the time I sat down to write ‘Family Pictures,’ I hadn’t written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn’t exercised, it will atrophy.